Homebrew Japanese character support for WP7 in development

Following on from our previous post regarding Thai character support in Windows Phone 7, we have news of Japanese WP7 developer “kaorun” (Kaoru Nakajima) developing a similar app, “Flickpad X2,” for typing Japanese characters on WP7.

The app is still in a prototype phase, but is intended to be published on the Marketplace in the future. A .xap file is available from kaorun’s blog for any of our Japanese-speaking readers who wish to test it and offer feedback.

While the app is currently home brew, it does not use any particularly private APIs, so it could show up officially inÂ Marketplace soon.

Until official support for Asian character sets is added, it’s good to see third parties creating alternatives, a sign of the strength of the Windows Phone developer community. Do any of our readers know of apps (in progress or otherwise) for other unsupported alphabets?